The crowd in the Lutheran church community room the other night was mostly Spanish-speaking, and the woman up front was leading them through one of those repeat-after-me exercises meant to drill useful phrases of a foreign language into a learner's brain.

It wasn't an English class but a know-your-rights session for immigrants, and the evening's main lesson, summed up in two blunt sentences, touched on one of the most important considerations for the millions of people living in the United States outside of its immigration laws:

"Do you have a warrant? Is it signed by a judge?"

Erika Sutherland said it again and again, and the audience at St. Luke's Church in Allentown repeated it, some robustly, some shyly.

Sutherland, a Spanish professor who directs an immigrant support group at Muhlenberg College, was adamant that they know it cold, because those few words could make the difference between unwittingly surrendering rights to the immigration official at the front door and making it through another day without being torn away from home and family.

PHOTO GALLERY: An outreach session by immigration lawyers for immigrant families at St. Luke's Church in Allentown on Wednesday, March 29, 2017.

(April Bartholomew)

"People are completely freaked out right now," Sutherland told me before the session, which was an opportunity for people caught up in the current turmoil to consult with attorneys on questions of growing urgency:

•How to protect American-born children if their parents are deported and they are not.

•How to make bail at a detention center.

•How to report a crime without risking arrest and deportation.

"It's impossible for people to be able to reach out to law enforcement if there is fear of the police connected to immigration," Sutherland said, addressing this last point. "That cuts off a huge sector of the community" for police investigating crime.

"Police and immigration officials don't have all-encompassing powers," said Katie Albarelli, an Allentown immigration attorney. "If it's a routine traffic stop and you have a driver's license, there's really not any reason for them to look past your license."

Most of the discussion was in Spanish, a language I don't know especially well despite six years of public school classes. But I picked up words and phrases that captured the gist of things: intimidacion; abogada (lawyer); derechos (rights).

Some phrases evidently had no English equivalent. In the midst of an otherwise Spanish sentence, Philadelphia immigration attorney Vanessa Stine uttered that ubiquitous "Law and Order" term, "motion to suppress."

Everyone at the session got a wallet-sized orange card with a caution, in Spanish, not to open the door to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent without ascertaining whether a warrant has been issued. The card also an English-language summary of what to tell ICE officers: "I do not wish to speak to you, answer your questions or sign or hand you any documents based on my Fifth Amendment rights ..."

The presentation offered at least one reassurance. In Allentown, immigrants outside the system have less to fear. The city, like many others, doesn't broadly cooperate with ICE and won't seek people out to arrest them solely because of their immigration status.

Indeed, the city on Thursday unveiled a new section of its website devoted to immigration and announced the upcoming opening of a Mayor's Office of Immigration Services, once work is finished at the cultural community center in Alliance Hall.

"Who knows how long these protections will last?" Sutherland said. "We'll see what kind of pressure comes down."